Katie Ambrose, PhD Candidate, University of York
keywords: Technology; Gender; Choral music; Performance
Recordings and other mediums of streamed music are tools that can be harnessed as we work towards the continued integration of women and girls into choral music-making environments. The unilateral positioning of the listener that is afforded in the recorded space means the removal of barriers between the listener and the performer. Using the Female Ear praxis, this paper will look at how the presence of technology in a ‘gendered space’ interacts with the way in which those musicking feel about performing in the space. Even though every listener is afforded the same advantage from their perceived location, the auditory viewpoint they are given may well have been cultivated through a male lens. This male lens may well be present regardless of the gender of the person doing the post production, as the production ideals that have been developed over time have been designed for men, by men.
These are preliminary findings that are attached to a wider thesis, which is a mixed methods study framed by Georgina Born’s theory of mediation (2011) to investigate the intersections between technology, gender, and choral performance. It includes analysis of the twenty-three completed interviews to date, which are drawn from a pool of conductors, singers, administrators, music producers and sound engineers, all of whom have 5 years of professional experience in their field. The data collected in the interviews is being coded through two theoretical frameworks (Born’s mediation theory and Sue et al. 's microaggression theory), both of which provide a basis for deductive coding.
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Katie Ambrose is a postgraduate researcher in the School of ACT at the University of York, working on a thesis about the intersection between choral music performance, technology, and gender. Katie is specifically interested in how a technologically mediated society may have accelerated gender diversity in ‘traditional’ choral environments, with a particular interest in whether social media and the ‘me-too’ movement have provided an added external pressure to institutions to make change. Alongside research, Katie is the General Manager of the baroque ensemble the Oxford Bach Soloists. She is also a freelance mezzo-soprano and regular deputises with groups and churches in London, and in the UK more broadly.